Caitlin Fisher was awarded the “Jury’s Choice” Award for the excellence of her submission to the ELO 2012 Media Art Show.

Caitlin Fisher holds the Canada Research Chair in Digital Culture in the Faculty of Fine Arts, York University, Toronto. A co-founder of York's Future Cinema Lab, and Director of York’s Augmented Reality Lab, her research investigates the future of narrative through explorations of interactive storytelling and interactive cinema in augmented reality environments, combining the development of authoring software with evocative literary constructs. She completed Canada's first born-digital hypertextual dissertation and her early hypermedia novella, These Waves of Girls, won the International Electronic Literature Award for Fiction in 2001 -- it has just been translated into Mandarin. Her augmented reality poem, Andromeda, was co-recipient of the International Vinaròs Prize for Electronic Literature in the digital poetry category in 2008. Most recently, an early iteration of her augmented reality tabletop theatre piece, Circle, was shortlisted in 2011 for the UK New Media Writing Prize. Increasingly her work also involves dealing with large repositories of data and exploring knowledge domain and interactive immersive visualizations as Fisher sits on the executive of the Centre for Information Visualization and Data-Driven Design, an $11M project housed at York University.

“Circle” is an augmented reality tabletop theatre piece that tells the story of three generations of women through a series of small stories. The first version of this piece was created using a custom marker tracking system and the user interacted with the piece by exploring the markers with a webcam, triggering small poetic voiceovers and videos. The version being premiered here was built in Unity and uses natural feature tracking -- the black and white markers of the earlier version are replaced by objects and photos. The user interacts with the piece by holding up an iPad or smartphone as a magic looking glass to explore the story world.